After This the Judgment (Part 6)

According to Works, Not Based on Works

At this point in the series, we have done a lot of clearing away, because much of the fear surrounding the judgment comes from systems that have been built by gathering a handful of passages, arranging them into a separate believer-only judgment, and then presenting that construction as though it were the clear and obvious teaching of Scripture.

But once Romans 14 and 2 Corinthians 5 are read in context, once the bēma argument is shown not to carry the weight placed upon it, once 1 Corinthians 3 is seen as a passage about ministry and the building of the church rather than a second courtroom for believers, and once the reward and crown texts are allowed to speak in their own contexts, the idea of multiple judgments begins to lose its exegetical footing.

That leaves us with the simpler and more consistent testimony of Scripture, namely, that there is one final judgment at the end of the age in which Christ judges the living and the dead.

However, that conclusion immediately raises the question that many Christians have been afraid to ask.

If there is only one judgment, and if believers and unbelievers alike appear before that judgment, then what exactly is happening there?

It is assumed that the only way to protect the believer from the actual terror is to separate his judgment from the judgment of the wicked, as if assurance depends upon the believer being placed in a different room, under a different standard, at a different event, for a different purpose.

But Scripture does not protect the believer by inventing a second judgment; it protects the believer by showing us what the one judgment actually is.

And the distinction that must be held carefully is this: the final judgment is according to works, but it is not based upon works.

To be clear, this distinction is not a clever way to dodge difficult texts, nor is it theological wordplay meant to soften hard passages, but is the necessary conclusion that comes from holding together everything Scripture says about present justification, future judgment, union with Christ, and the public revealing of faith.

The Judgment Is Revelation

One of the clearest themes running through the biblical teaching on judgment is that the final judgment is fundamentally revelatory in nature, because it is the public unveiling of what is already true before God.

No matter what context we are coming from, the judgment does not function as though God is gathering information that He did not previously possess, nor does it function as though the final day is the moment when God finally decides what to do with people after reviewing the evidence.

God is not ignorant before the judgment, nor is he uncertain before the judgment.

Rather, the final judgment brings into the open what has always been true, so that faith and unbelief, righteousness and rebellion, union with Christ and rejection of Christ are publicly manifested before the throne of God.

This is why Scripture repeatedly speaks of the judgment in terms of exposure, manifestation, unveiling, and bringing hidden things into the light.

Paul writes in Romans 2:16 that God will “judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ according to my gospel,” and that language is important because Paul is not describing a judgment that merely evaluates external behavior, but one that brings hidden realities into the open.

Likewise, in 1 Corinthians 4:5, Paul warns the Corinthians not to judge before the time, “until the Lord come, who both will bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and will make manifest the counsels of the hearts,” and while that passage is often dragged into reward theology, Paul’s point in context is that only the Lord can finally reveal what is true about His servants.

The same pattern appears in the teaching of Jesus, because when Christ speaks about fruit, trees, false prophets, and final judgment, He consistently treats works as revelatory rather than creative.

In Matthew 7:16–20, Jesus says that false prophets are known by their fruits, because men do not gather grapes from thorns or figs from thistles, and His point is not that fruit creates the tree, but that fruit reveals the tree.

A corrupt tree brings forth evil fruit because it is corrupt, and a good tree brings forth good fruit because it is good.

That is the same category we must bring with us into the final judgment.

Works do not create union with Christ, but they reveal whether such union exists.

Works do not justify the sinner before God, but they publicly manifest the reality of the faith by which the sinner is united to Christ.

This is why the final judgment should not be understood as a divine investigation in which God determines whether the believer’s works are good enough to confirm the verdict of justification, but as the public revealing of what God already knows and what Christ has already secured.

The judgment reveals.

It shows the difference between the righteous and the wicked, not by creating that difference at the last moment, but by exposing the difference that already existed in relation to Christ.

According to Works, Not Based Upon Works

The difficulty, of course, is that Scripture repeatedly says that the final judgment is according to works, and if we are going to be honest with the text, we cannot avoid that language.

Paul says in Romans 2:6 that God “will render to every man according to his deeds.”

Jesus says in Matthew 16:27 that the Son of Man will come in the glory of His Father with His angels, and “then he shall reward every man according to his works.”

Revelation 20:12 says that the dead stand before God, the books are opened, and the dead are judged “out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works.”

Revelation 22:12 records Christ saying, “Behold, I come quickly; and my reward is with me, to give every man according as his work shall be.”

Those texts are real, and any doctrine of the final judgment that pretends they are not there is not dealing honestly with Scripture.

However, the problem, as Dane Ortuld points out, is when “according to works” is treated as though it means “based upon works,”¹

This distinction is important because if “according to works” and “based upon works” are not carefully distinguished, then the final judgment quickly becomes a second ground of acceptance before God. If this is true, then the believer is forced back into himself to evaluate whether his obedience is sufficient, whether his fruit is enough, and whether his Christian life can survive the scrutiny of the final day.

But that is not how Scripture speaks about the believer’s works.

Scripture does not present the believer’s works as a pile of spiritual evidence that the believer must anxiously inspect to determine whether he has done enough to be accepted.

Rather, Scripture presents the believer’s works as the fruit of grace, prepared by God beforehand, flowing from union with Christ, and therefore present because God Himself is at work in His people.

Paul says this directly in Ephesians 2:8–10. We are saved “by grace… through faith,” and this is “not of yourselves,” and “not of works, lest any man should boast.” But Paul does not stop there, because he immediately says, “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained,” or prepared beforehand, “that we should walk in them.”

That means the believer’s good works are not the ground of salvation, but the fruit of salvation. They are the ordained path in which God causes the believer to walk because he has already been created anew in Christ Jesus.

This matters for assurance because if the final judgment is based upon works, then the believer must constantly ask whether his works are enough to secure the verdict.

But if the final judgment is according to works, then the works brought into the light are not a rival foundation next to Christ, but the public evidence of God’s own workmanship in the believer.

In other words, the believer does not look at his works and say, “Are these enough to justify me?” He looks to Christ and says, “He alone justifies me,” and then understands his works as the fruit God prepared beforehand, the evidence that grace was not barren, and the public manifestation that he truly belonged to Christ.

This is why Paul can say in Philippians 2:12–13 that believers are to “work out” their salvation with fear and trembling, not because they are working for the ground of salvation, but because “it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.”

The believer’s obedience is real, but it is not autonomous. The fruit is truly borne in the believer’s life, but the life of the tree comes from God.

This also fits the language of Jesus in John 15, where He says, “I am the vine, ye are the branches,” and then explains that the one who abides in Him bears much fruit, because “without me ye can do nothing” (John 15:5).

That is the key distinction.

A judgment based upon works would make the fruit the reason the branch is alive.

A judgment according to works recognizes the fruit as the evidence that the branch was truly joined to the vine.

A judgment based upon works would turn Ephesians 2:10 into a second foundation after Ephesians 2:8–9.

Paul is explicit about this in Philippians 3:9, where he says that he wants to be found in Christ, “not having mine own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ.” Likewise, Galatians 2:16 says that “a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ,” because “by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified.”

So when Scripture says that God judges according to works, it cannot mean that the believer’s works become the basis of his acceptance, because Paul has already ruled that out entirely.

Rather, works are brought forward as evidence.

They reveal what is true because they manifest union with Christ.

They publicly display the fruit of the grace that God Himself prepared beforehand

This same distinction must also be applied to the rebellious and unbelieving, because when Scripture says the wicked are judged according to their works, it does not mean that their evil works are the ultimate basis of their condemnation in isolation from their state in Adam, their unbelief before God, and their bondage to sin. Rather, their works publicly reveal and testify to the reality of their rebellion, unbelief, and alienation from God.

This is important because Scripture does not present evil works as though they create the unbeliever’s identity before God, but as the manifestation of what the unbeliever already is apart from grace.

The fruit does not make the tree corrupt. The fruit reveals that the tree is corrupt. In the same way, evil works do not make a sinner a child of the devil in the ultimate sense, but reveal that he is acting out of bondage, unbelief, and opposition to God.

This is exactly the logic John gives in 1 John.

John writes, “He that committeth sin is of the devil; for the devil sinneth from the beginning” (1 John 3:8), and then says, “In this the children of God are manifest, and the children of the devil” (1 John 3:10).

That word “manifest” does not say that a person becomes a child of the devil by committing acts of sin, as though the works create the nature. He is saying that the works reveal the nature. The doing manifests the belonging.

This is why Jesus can say in Matthew 12:33–37 that the tree is known by its fruit, and then immediately speak of men giving account for every idle word in the day of judgment. The words do not create the evil heart, but they reveal it. “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh” (Matt. 12:34). The speech is judged because it manifests the heart.

Likewise, Revelation 20:12 says that the dead are judged “according to their works,” but the passage also distinguishes those who are not written in the book of life (Rev. 20:15). The works are the public record of rebellion, but the deeper reality is that these are those outside the life of God, outside Christ, and outside the book of life.

This is also the logic of Romans 2, where Paul says that God “will render to every man according to his deeds” (Rom. 2:6), while the larger argument of Romans goes on to show that all alike are under sin, that “there is none righteous, no, not one” (Rom. 3:10), and that no one will be justified by the deeds of the law (Rom. 3:20).

Paul is not contradicting himself. He is showing that the works of the wicked publicly confirm the guilt and rebellion that already belong to them in Adam.

So the rebellious are judged according to their evil works because those works reveal the truth of their unbelief, just as believers are judged according to their good works because those works reveal the truth of God’s grace in them.

In both cases, works are revelatory.

This keeps the final judgment from becoming a second system of justification by works on either side. The wicked are not condemned because their bad works merely outweigh their good works. They are condemned because they stand outside of Christ, and their works reveal the truth of their rebellion. Likewise, believers are not accepted because their good works outweigh their bad works. They are accepted because they are in Christ, and their works reveal the truth of God’s grace.

That is why the final judgment is according to works, but not based upon works.

So that we are extremely clear about the purpose of work, we need to be reminded that the Scripture speaks of justification as a present and settled verdict for those who are in Christ.

Romans 5:1 says, “Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,”

Romans 8:1 says, “There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus,”

Romans 8:33–34 to ask, “Who shall lay any thing to the charge of God’s elect? It is God that justifieth. Who is he that condemneth?”

One Judgment, Different Outcomes

This is where the one-judgment framework becomes important, because Scripture does not solve the believer’s assurance by removing him from the final judgment altogether, but by showing that the same judgment has different outcomes depending upon one’s relation to Christ.

Matthew 25:31–46 presents the Son of Man coming in His glory, sitting upon the throne of His glory, and gathering all nations before Him

Notice, there is one throne, one appearing, one gathering, and one separation.

The sheep and the goats are not sent to different judgment events. They stand before the same King, and the judgment reveals two different realities.

The sheep are welcomed into the kingdom prepared for them from the foundation of the world, while the goats are sent away into everlasting punishment.

Revelation 20 gives a similar picture, because the dead stand before God, the books are opened, and judgment is rendered according to what is written, yet the book of life also appears as the decisive marker of those who belong to God.

The passage does not present several judgments with separate purposes, but a single climactic judgment in which works are brought into the light and the final distinction between life and condemnation is publicly manifested.

Conclusion

Once the framework of multiple judgments is removed, the final judgment begins to make far more sense within the broader testimony of Scripture, because it is not a second courtroom in which believers anxiously wait to discover whether they will remain accepted before God, but the final public unveiling of what has always been true concerning every person’s relation to Christ.

That means the believer’s confidence in the final judgment does not rest upon the strength of his works, even though those works will be brought into the light as evidence of grace, but upon the finished work of Christ, whose righteousness is already counted as his own.

And if the believer’s works are not the ground of his acceptance, then we are finally ready to ask the question that brought us to this discussion.

What does Scripture actually mean by reward?

1. Ortlund, Dane, “Justified by Faith, Judged According to Works: Another Look at A Pauline Paradox,” JETS 52/2. (2009): 323